


every ghost you've ever seen

by the_great_catsby



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe, DCU, DCU (Comics), Justice League (2017), Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman (Comics), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Drama, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Movie(s), Romance, War, i'm suing patty and gal and chris for emotional distress, ish, it's been three months and i'm still not over this film, the last ten minutes of the movie ended it, the no mans land scene gave me life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 02:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11865051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_great_catsby/pseuds/the_great_catsby
Summary: But first, right now, there is this, this other war after the war: Diana standing in the crowd in the pouring rain, moments in the twilight where she’ll see Steve around every corner and in every face; in every soldier with their uniform buttoned wrong, a battered coat over their shoulders, in every tweed suit and fedora pulled low to hide eyes burning like banners, in every moment a woman moves to grasp a man’s hand on the crowded streets of London. Nights in bed, his watch ticking soothingly and ceaselessly on her wrist, where she lets herself believe, if only for a minute, that the sound is Steve’s heartbeat. That she can turn over and he will be right there, lying next to her. But these moments, too, pass. Alone in the crowd, surrounded by cold rain and the impermanent, haunting half-life of memory, the barely submerged dream of what could have been, Diana cannot help but think of the terrible, insurmountable gulf of years between then and now.Diana, after the war.





	every ghost you've ever seen

  
_Have you ever been in love?_  
_Once._  
_How did it end?_  
_It hasn’t._

* * *

Later on, there will be celebrations after the armistice is signed and the laughter of children bubbling down the streets of Belgium again. There will be a house near Etta, weekly lunches with her husband and children, countless ice creams and picnics until she becomes part of the family too; weekends spent sitting in low-lit smoky jazz clubs late at night watching Charlie sing and Sameer act, a clarinet in the background and velvet all around her; endless nights spent lying on her back on the forest floor surrounded by pine needles and quiet of the trees, gazing at the stars with Chief. Later she will visit nearly every country in the world, anywhere she’s needed, keeping all her belongings in two suitcases and picking up countless antiques in forgotten museums and pawn shops, living a life of freedom and purpose and very little regrets. 

But first, right now, there is this, this other war after the war: Diana standing in the crowd in the pouring rain, moments in the twilight where she’ll see Steve around every corner and in every face; in every soldier with their uniform buttoned wrong, a battered coat over their shoulders, in every tweed suit and fedora pulled low to hide eyes burning like banners, in every moment a woman moves to grasp a man’s hand on the crowded streets of London. Nights in bed, his watch ticking soothingly and ceaselessly on her wrist, where she lets herself believe, if only for a minute, that the sound is Steve’s heartbeat. That she can turn over and he will be right there, lying next to her. But these moments, too, pass. Alone in the crowd, surrounded by cold rain and the impermanent, haunting half-life of memory, the barely submerged dream of what could have been, Diana cannot help but think of the terrible, insurmountable gulf of years between then and now. 

* * *

As a child who wished and waited to fight, who was created for war itself in its most final sense, Diana instead spent her early years on Themyscira under the tutelage of her mother’s senators: learning Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew; reading Cleo’s treatises on pleasure and the body, studying under the most influential warrior-philosophers on the island. Hippolyta hoped, Diana suspects now, that in doing this Diana would find her purpose and desire as much in art and history as in as war itself. That she would be more than just a weapon, a Godkiller, but fully human as well. But Diana never worried about that, not really, because even then she believed, and that was enough. 

When Diana first began studying astronomy, she had thought that the moon was the eye of Zeus and night sky the jeweled fabric of his toga, and grew up believing and looking for in the god in the sky, who had given life to both her and her island. She prayed to him during the war in which Steve and so many others were killed, in those weeks before she understood that she herself was the deliverance. 

Though he never really said so, Diana knows that Steve thought faith in general to be a little implausible, or at the very least, unreliable in the wreckage of the Great War. For other than the brief conversations they had about Ares and Zeus, Steve did not like to talk about religion, not when he was a self-professed thief and a liar and spy and had also balanced the lives of others in his hands like a god during the war. But he didn’t realize, Diana thinks now, that faith is in everything. He didn’t understand that after all the evil and killing and destruction he’d seen, his shared belief, strengthened by her, in the good of humans and his moral conviction to do right by them despite it all was a kind of faith in and of itself. He’d believed in so much after all, however ironic he would have found that when he was alive. He’d believed in mankind, and in Diana herself. 

And so in those first few terrible weeks after Steve’s death, this is what she clings onto in her moments of grief and doubt, when she would turn to speak with him out of habit only to remember and fall silent, or wake up from endless nightmares of planes exploding in the sky: her constant faith in herself, her purpose, and Steve, who had supported her and urged her towards her destiny ever since Diana had seen it for herself and told him of it, who had died believing and knowing that she could save the world. It is hard to die for your beliefs, to give up everyone you love for a cause greater than yourself, she thinks, but harder still to live for them. Still, even through the grief, through the arduous and painful task of rebuilding, she knows she is strong enough for this. 

* * *

And indeed, as the months pass, Diana begins smiling more easily again, the memory and grief of Steve’s death no longer burned quite so bitterly into her retinas to continue to haunting her everywhere she went, though it would still always be a wound. Helping protect others and preserving the peace of a quiet life, as well as having Etta, Chief, Sameer, and Charlie around, though they grieved as well, gave her happiness. In the moments when they celebrated the end of the war together, running to Trafalgar Square heedless of the melting ice cream cones in their hands, or gathered in front of the fire to reminisce, laughing at Sameer’s memory of the bar fight the night they first met or Etta’s recollection of when she and Steve first took Diana shopping to help her look “less distracting”, she was reminded of the steadfast love and friendship they shared with one another. 

Ares was a fool, Diana thinks, to believe that her love was the kind that could only be redeemed through destruction and death, even if it was of someone like Dr. Maru, that it could be manipulated into a weapon that would end humanity. Love was never and will never be a source of hopelessness and pain for her. Love is her greatest strength, is the strength and faith that Steve reminds her of even after death, and gives her even now an infinite reserve of joy. 

* * *

Later, there is a house in New York, London, Hong Kong, Paris, Diana moving from city to city as the years go on and she remains ageless— but for her, there is always, always a _home_ in Veld. Though for more than a century, the hotel has no longer stood on the streets of Belgium, in Diana’s memory, its windows still glow, restless with electric light, the joy of celebration, the taste of winter and wine and warmth. The way Steve looked at her in the moonlight when he was still alive and loved her. 

Diana has revisited that night and that home many times over, the memory growing faded and worn as a treasured old photograph does. There they were together. Arms around each other’s waists, just holding on. Falling in love and not even knowing it yet. 

In that memory, a stolen moment in the middle of a war rendered meaningful by the feelings of the moment, there was a kiss in the doorway. A droll reminder from her that men are not necessary for pleasure, a laugh that made the skin around his eyes crinkle. An embrace, a stroke, lips on a neck and a mouth on a breast. Lying beside him that night, she felt an awareness of a beginning. 

In her mind, she opens the curtains to the room, Steve already fading behind her. The stars were so beautiful and bright that night against the snow. In her apartment in Paris, her heart stops for a beat, her skin tingles. And she shivers in the humidity of the Paris summer air, longing for a winter night in Veld. 

* * *

For Diana, memories of Steve now, thankfully, no longer hold the impossible knife-blade of remembrance they once did. Still, she thinks, it never became easier, remembering when he died. She will go months now without having a pang accompany her memories of him, but eventually, it always finds her, creeping up on her in those increasingly rare nights when she returns to her apartment after a day spent fighting or working with Clark and Bruce alone but also feeling lonely. There are other men and women that Diana meets and dates and sleeps with, of course, but they never stay, and she never really falls in love with them the way she did with Steve again. Not really. 

So there are still some mornings when she wakes up with a dead man’s name on her lips, haunted by the the unfulfillment of her dream, of their final moments together, only understood once he was gone. In those dreams, Steve is letting go of her hand after having just given her his watch, telling Diana that he loves her. She opens her mouth to tell him that she loves him too, but the seconds of that memory stretch out to infinity; they are frozen in the tragedy of eternal stasis. Steve always fades, Diana never gets to tell him what was so remarkably, obviously clear in the aftermath of his death to them all, Etta and Sameer and Charlie and Chief in the years following: that she loved him back, whether or not he knew it too. 

And so when Clark dies, Diana understands by the way that Lois rushes forward and cradles his body and whispers his name that she loves him. And if she herself was not so drained after the fight with Luthor’s monster, if she wasn’t so stricken with horror, if she didn’t know that nothing she could say to Lois right now could help except for _I understand_ , she would have told Lois what she’d learned: you will survive this, though not unchanged, and you will carry this man with you for the rest of your life. But you will be happy again, and your life will be richer for having known him. 

* * *

Because for all the nights that she is haunted by Steve’s death, there are many, many more days of joy and love. When Lois asks how this is possible in the weeks following Clark’s own death, Diana is reminded of a conversation she had almost a century before, sitting next to Etta in London the last few days before the armistice was signed. “Because you’ve lost,” she says gently to Lois, echoing the words she herself heard so many years ago, “with everyone you love from now on, that love will be deepened by the understanding of what its loss means and the sacrifice that goes into making peace possible. And because you’ve seen the worst that mankind is capable of, you’ve also seen the best, and you now know that only love can save the world. You’ll fight with a greater purpose because you know what it really means to stay and fight for these humans and for love.” 

When Diana first lost the photograph taken of her, Steve, Sameer, Charlie, and Chief after the liberation of Veld, she was gripped with a fear that with the loss of the photograph, she’d lose Steve a second time, memory anchorless even as her heart still suffocated with grief, but she now knows that not to be true. She sees him in every couple that sways together in the snow, in the laughter of children, in the beauty of an ordinary life without fear: in breakfasts, in people reading the paper and going to work, in every wedding and every baby. She will not lose Steve like she did his photograph, she will find his memory everywhere there is peace and love and the reminder of the goodness humanity is capable of, despite of and even because of its flaws. 

* * *

One of the last things that Steve ever said to her was “I wish we had more time”, and Diana wishes that she could tell him that she did, they did, that she still loves him and in that way he’ll never be truly gone or forgotten. But she also thinks that both of them knew, deep down inside, that their relationship was never one that was going to end ordinarily, despite what they wanted. That they would never get the quiet domesticity of a mundane life together they’d hoped for, with the breakfasts and the marriages and the growing old together, that from the moment they met Steve was always going to blow up the plane and leave her to save that day because of her purpose, and his after he’d met her, was to defend the possibility of that life for others. Ares had believed that Steve’s death would be the end of Diana’s hopes, of her dream of an ordinary life and a peaceful future, of having many more days to dance in the first snowfall of the year and walk together in the streets holding hands, of waking up in a home to the smell of coffee and the excited shouts of laughter of children, linens wrinkled with the weight of her husband next to her, his hand in hers and the wedding ring cold against her skin. But it was only the first dream, the beginning of a lifetime of other dreams, of fighting for a thousand other love stories and their futures of early morning newspapers and breakfasts by protecting the peace that makes such ordinary living possible. This is her mission, forever, and she understands why Steve made the choice he did. She wouldn’t have loved him as much if he didn’t. But still, Diana can’t help but wish things ended differently. 

Alone at night, she thinks of the stories only they know: of a boat sailing on peaceful waters towards London, two people lying besides one another, gazing up at the stars in the night sky, Steve explaining that marriage was when “you go before a judge and you swear to love, honor, and cherish one another until death do you part.” 

She’d then asked, “And do they… love each other until death?”. 

“Not very often, no.” 

“Then why do they do it?” 

“I have no idea”, he’d responded. 

Diana now knows, she understands why they do it and she thinks Steve did too in those final moments before his plane exploded like the death of a star in the sky. There is something honorable and beautiful in the recognition of the persistence of love itself; there are things that even death itself cannot touch. Because for all that she’s learned in all these centuries, she knows one thing better than them all: 

Love is the one thing that transcends both space and time. 

**Author's Note:**

> This entire fic and the idea behind it was basically inspired by two wondertrev gifsets that have stayed with me. The opening line comes from http://bonesmccoy.co.vu/post/162066612225 and the last line from http://thelastsjedi.tumblr.com/post/161314281034/insp because I'm an unoriginal person who spends too much time on tumblr getting emotional over a fictional ship, probably.
> 
> Anyways, I saw the Wonder Woman movie in June (?) and just posted this because I was in the hospital for two and a half months (until two days ago, basically) and they banned the internet because they thought it was "not conducive to my health" #goodtimes. 
> 
> I had a bit of a struggle writing this (besides the whole I've never written fanfic/fiction in general before) because I think it's difficult to navigate in writing a post-movie fic for Wonder Woman in particular. A lot of the discourse I've seen around the film goes somewhere along the lines of "Diana's story/motivations is too dependent on Steve", and there's a tricky line to navigate in terms of writing grief/mourning fics while also keeping in mind the feminism that's so intrinsically tied to Wonder Woman, and whether that means she should have more agency in her narrative or be this "strong independent woman". I ended up mostly leaning on this quote from Patty Jenkins to guide me when I wrote this fic:
> 
> "I feel like one of the most ironically sexist things that happened to women heroes for so long was that they had universal storytelling taken away from them. So, male superheroes could have Lois Lane. They can have love, they can have vulnerability, they can have complexity. But women superheroes or strong women characters had to be, ‘I don’t need anyone, I’m the toughest person in the world.’ That’s not fair to anybody. No human being is an island like that."
> 
> but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well as your response to this fic! Thanks for reading!


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